Some illustrations:
Chess Knight
(in German, Springer)
See also…
More technically (click image for details):
Sunday, August 10, 2014
Friday, September 15, 2023
For the Players
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From "Knight to Move," by Fritz Leiber "… You were talking about basic games. Well, the chessboard is clearly a spider’s web with crisscross strands—in Go you even put the pieces on the intersections. The object of the game is to hunt down and immobilize the enemy King, just as a spider paralyzes its victim and sometimes wraps it in its silk. But here’s the clincher: the Knight, the piece most characteristic of chess, has exactly eight crooked moves when it stands in the clear—the number of a spider’s crooked legs, and eyes too! This suggests that all chess-playing planets are Spider-infiltrated from way back. It also suggests that all the chessplayers here for the tournament are Spiders—your shock battalion to take over 61 Cygni 5.” Colonel von Hohenwald sighed. “I was afraid you’d catch on, dear,” he said softly. “Now you’ve signed your abduction warrant at the very least. You may still be able to warn your HQ, but before they can come to your aid, this planet will be in our hands.” He frowned. “But why did you spill this to me, Erica? If you had played dumb—” “I spilled it to you,” she said, “because I wanted you to know that your plot’s been blown––and that my side has already taken countermeasures! We’ve made a crooked Knight’s move too. Has the significance of track games never occurred to you, Colonel? The one-dimensional track, sinuously turning, obviously symbolizes the snake. The pieces are the little bugs and animals the snake has swallowed. As for the dice, well, one of the throws is called Snake Eyes. So be assured that all the k’ta’hra players here are Snakes, ready to counter any Spider grab at 61 Cygni 5.” The Colonel’s mouth almost gaped. |
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Sunday, September 10, 2023
Games Theory
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From "Knight to Move," by Fritz Leiber "… You were talking about basic games. Well, the chessboard is clearly a spider’s web with crisscross strands—in Go you even put the pieces on the intersections. The object of the game is to hunt down and immobilize the enemy King, just as a spider paralyzes its victim and sometimes wraps it in its silk. But here’s the clincher: the Knight, the piece most characteristic of chess, has exactly eight crooked moves when it stands in the clear—the number of a spider’s crooked legs, and eyes too! This suggests that all chess-playing planets are Spider-infiltrated from way back. It also suggests that all the chessplayers here for the tournament are Spiders—your shock battalion to take over 61 Cygni 5.” Colonel von Hohenwald sighed. “I was afraid you’d catch on, dear,” he said softly. “Now you’ve signed your abduction warrant at the very least. You may still be able to warn your HQ, but before they can come to your aid, this planet will be in our hands.” He frowned. “But why did you spill this to me, Erica? If you had played dumb—” “I spilled it to you,” she said, “because I wanted you to know that your plot’s been blown––and that my side has already taken countermeasures! We’ve made a crooked Knight’s move too. Has the significance of track games never occurred to you, Colonel? The one-dimensional track, sinuously turning, obviously symbolizes the snake. The pieces are the little bugs and animals the snake has swallowed. As for the dice, well, one of the throws is called Snake Eyes. So be assured that all the k’ta’hra players here are Snakes, ready to counter any Spider grab at 61 Cygni 5.” The Colonel’s mouth almost gaped. |
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Thursday, January 21, 2021
Cock Tale for Rikki
With apologies to those readers unable to follow knight moves .
The Queen's Gambit , by Walter Tevis,
published Feb. 1983 —
“Would you care for a cocktail?” he asked pleasantly.
She looked around her at the quiet restaurant,
at the people eating lunch, at the table with desserts
near the velvet rope at the entrance to the dining room.
“A Gibson,” she said. “On the rocks.”
"A silver tide of phosphenes boiled across my field of vision
as the matrix began to unfold in my head, a 3-D chessboard,
infinite and perfectly transparent."
"'Rikki Don't Lose That Number' is a single
released in 1974 by rock/jazz rock group Steely Dan
and the opening track of their third album Pretzel Logic .
It was the most successful single of the group's career,
peaking at number 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 in
the summer of 1974." — Wikipedia
Brian Harley, Mate in Two Moves , 1931—
“The key is the cocktail that begins the proceedings.”
See as well my post "Introduction to Cyberspace" (May 26, 2020).
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Tuesday, January 5, 2021
The Shop on the Corner
George Steiner on chess —
"… the common bond between chess, music, and mathematics
may, finally, be the absence of language."
— George Steiner, Fields of Force: Fischer and Spassky at Reykjavik ,
Viking hardcover, June 1974.
In memory of George Steiner, of Walter Tevis, and of B&B Smoke Shop,
corner of Third Ave. and Liberty St., Warren, Pennsylvania, in the 1950s,
where I purchased . . .
At that point in my life, language interested me more than chess.
But I can identify with the protagonist of Walter Tevis's Queen's Gambit ,
(the book, not the film) who visited a similar smoke shop in 1960 —
… There was a long rack of magazines behind her. When she
got the cigarettes, she turned and began looking. Senator
Kennedy’s picture was on the cover of Time and Newsweek :
he was running for President . . . .
. . . Walking home with the folded [chess] magazine tucked
securely against her flat belly she thought again about that
rook move Morphy hadn’t made. The magazine said
Morphy was “perhaps the most brilliant player in the
history of the game.” The rook could come to bishop seven,
and Black had better not take it with his knight because…
She stopped, halfway down the block. A dog was barking
somewhere, and across the street from her on a well-mowed
lawn two small boys were loudly playing tag. After the
second pawn moved to king knight five, then the remaining
rook could slide over, and if the black player took
the pawn, the bishop could uncover, and if he didn’t…
She closed her eyes. If he didn’t capture it, Morphy
could force a mate in two, starting with the bishop sacrificing
itself with a check. If he did take it, the white pawn
moved again, and then the bishop went the other way
and there was nothing Black could do. There it was. One
of the little boys across the street began crying. There was
nothing Black could do. The game would be over in
twenty-nine moves at least. The way it was in the book, it
had taken Paul Morphy thirty-six moves to win. He
hadn’t seen the move with the rook. But she had.
Overhead the sun shone in a blank blue sky. The dog
continued barking. The child wailed. Beth walked slowly
home and replayed the game. Her mind was as lucid as a
perfect, stunning diamond.
***
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Sunday, December 2, 2012
Realism
From the Los Angeles Times yesterday—
"Chess player Elena Akhmilovskaya Donaldson sits
in deep concentration at the U.S. chess championship
in Seattle in 2002. (Greg Gilbert / Seattle Times /
January 5, 2002)"
Linda Shaw, Seattle Times :
"Elena Akhmilovskaya Donaldson, who was once the world's
second-ranked women's chess player and eloped in 1988
with the captain of the U.S. chess team when they were both
playing at a tournament in Greece, has died. She was 55.
Donaldson, who earned the title of international women's
grandmaster, died Nov. 18 in her adopted hometown of Seattle…."
From the Log24 post "Sermon" on the date of Donaldson's death,
Sunday, Nov. 18, 2012—
"You must allow us to play every conceivable combination of chess."
— Marie-Louise von Franz in Number and Time
An October 2011 post titled Realism in Plato's Cave displays
the following image:
Cover illustration: Knight, Death, and the Devil,
by Albrecht Dürer
George Steiner and myself in Closing the Circle, a Log24 post
of Sept. 4, 2009:
“Allegoric associations of death with chess are perennial….”
"Yes, they are."
For related remarks on knight moves and the devil, see
today's previous two posts, Knight's Labyrinth and The Rite.
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Monday, April 23, 2012
Mate in Six
In memory of Mike Wallace—
- An April 8 post noting the death of Wallace—
a NY Times obituary notice with ad at top— "The North Face"
- An April 21 post noting the death of Charles Colson,
reportedly at at 3:12 PM on Saturday, April 21, 2012,
with ad at top— "Discover New Horizons"
- An April 21 post linking to a 3/12 post (this date being
suggested by the reported time of Colson's death)
that has a review of the film "The Ninth Configuration"
- An April 22 post with six lines that some might
interpret as meeting on a horizon, two lines that might
be interpreted as meeting at a "depth horizon," and
a ninth line that emerges from the other eight
- An April 23 post that combines a passage from
"The Ninth Configuration" with a detail from
the North Face ad that appeared above Wallace's
NY TImes obituary on April 8 and again above
Colson's obituary on April 23
- "The game's…"
See also Knight Moves.
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Friday, April 3, 2009
Friday April 3, 2009
Knight Moves
“Lord, I remember”
— Bob Seger
“Philosophers ponder the idea of identity: what it is to give something a name on Monday and have it respond to that name on Friday….”
— Bernard Holland in The New York Times of Monday, May 20, 1996
Yesterday’s afternoon entry cited philosopher John Holbo on chess. This, together with Holland’s remark above and Monday’s entries on Zizek, suggests…
Holbo on Zizek
(pdf, 11 pages)
(pdf, 11 pages)
In this excellent analysis,
Holbo quotes Kierkegaard:
“… the knight of faith
‘has the pain of being unable to
make himself intelligible to others'”
(Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling)
For some material that may serve to illustrate Kierkegaard’s remark, see Log24 on Twelfth Night and Epiphany this year.
“… There was a problem laid out on the board, a six-mover. I couldn’t solve it, like a lot of my problems. I reached down and moved a knight…. I looked down at the chessboard. The move with the knight was wrong. I put it back where I had moved it from. Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn’t a game for knights.”
— Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
Perhaps a game for bishops?
Cardinal Manning
Click on the cardinal
for a link to some remarks
related to the upcoming film
“Angels & Demons” and to
a Paris “Sein Feld.”
Context: the five entries
ending at 9:26 AM
on March 10, 2009…
and, for Kierkegaard,
Diamonds Are Forever.
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Thursday, April 2, 2009
Thursday April 2, 2009
In memory of
physics historian
Martin J. Klein,
(June 25, 1924-
March 28, 2009)
"… in physics itself, there was what appeared, briefly, to be an ending, which then very quickly gave way to a new beginning: The quest for the ultimate building-blocks of the universe had been taken down to the molecular level in nineteenth-century kinetic theory… and finally to the nuclear level in the second and third decades of the twentieth century. For a moment in the 1920s the quest appeared to have ended…. However… this paradise turned out to be, if not exactly a fool's paradise, then perhaps an Eden lost."
— No Truth Except in the Details: Essays in Honor of Martin J. Klein, introduction by A.J. Kox and Daniel Siegel, June 25, 1994
New York Times obituary dated April 1, 2009:
"Martin J. Klein, a historian of modern physics…. died Saturday, [March 28, 2009] in Chapel Hill, N.C. He was 84 and lived in Chapel Hill."
Klein edited, among other things, Paul Ehrenfest: Collected Scientific Papers (publ. by North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1959).
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Related material:
"Almost every famous chess game
is a well-wrought urn
in Cleanth Brooks’ sense."
— John Holbo,
Now We See
Wherein Lies the Pleasure
"The entire sequence of moves in these… chapters reminds one– or should remind one– of a certain type of chess problem where the point is not merely the finding of a mate in so many moves, but what is termed 'retrograde analysis'…."
— Vladimir Nabokov, foreword to The Defense
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Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Tuesday March 10, 2009
Language Game
“Music, mathematics, and chess are in vital respects dynamic acts of location. Symbolic counters are arranged in significant rows. Solutions, be they of a discord, of an algebraic equation, or of a positional impasse, are achieved by a regrouping, by a sequential reordering of individual units and unit-clusters (notes, integers, rooks or pawns). The child-master, like his adult counterpart, is able to visualize in an instantaneous yet preternaturally confident way how the thing should look several moves hence. He sees the logical, the necessary harmonic and melodic argument as it arises out of an initial key relation or the preliminary fragments of a theme. He knows the order, the appropriate dimension, of the sum or geometric figure before he has performed the intervening steps. He announces mate in six because the victorious end position, the maximally efficient configuration of his pieces on the board, lies somehow ‘out there’ in graphic, inexplicably clear sight of his mind….”
“… in some autistic enchantment, pure as one of Bach’s inverted canons or Euler’s formula for polyhedra.”
— George Steiner, “A Death of Kings,” in The New Yorker, issue dated Sept. 7, 1968
Related material:
“Classrooms are filled with discussions not of the Bible and Jesus but of 10 ‘core values’– perseverance and curiosity, for instance– that are woven into the curriculum.”
— “Secular Education, Catholic Values,” by Javier C. Hernandez, The New York Times, Sunday, March 8, 2009
“… There was a problem laid out on the board, a six-mover. I couldn’t solve it, like a lot of my problems. I reached down and moved a knight…. I looked down at the chessboard. The move with the knight was wrong. I put it back where I had moved it from. Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn’t a game for knights.”
— Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
The Chandler quotation appears in “Language Game,” an entry in this journal on April 7, 2008.
Some say the “Language Game” date, April 7, is the true date (fixed, permanent) of the Crucifixion– by analogy, Eliot’s “still point” and Jung’s “centre.” (See yesterday, noon.)
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Saturday, February 23, 2008
Saturday February 23, 2008
Jumpers
"An acute study of the links
between word and fact"
— Nina daVinci Nichols
Thanks to a Virginia reader for a reminder:
| Virginia | /391062427/item.html? | 2/22/2008 7:37 PM |
The link is to a Log24 entry
that begins as follows…
that begins as follows…
Johnny Cash:
"And behold,
a white horse."
Chess Knight
(in German, Springer)
This, along with the "jumper" theme in the previous two entries, suggests a search on springer jumper.That search yields a German sports phrase, "Springer kommt!" A search on that phrase yields the following:
"Liebe Frau vBayern,
mich würde interessieren wie man
mit diesem Hintergrund
(vonbayern.de/german/anna.html)
zu Springer kommt?"
Background of "Frau vBayern" from thePeerage.com:
Anna-Natascha Prinzessin zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Berleburg
F, #64640, b. 15 March 1978Last Edited=20 Oct 2005
Anna-Natascha Prinzessin zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Berleburg was born on 15 March 1978. She is the daughter of Ludwig Ferdinand Prinz zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Berleburg and Countess Yvonne Wachtmeister af Johannishus. She married Manuel Maria Alexander Leopold Jerg Prinz von Bayern, son of Leopold Prinz von Bayern and Ursula Mohlenkamp, on 6 August 2005 at Nykøping, Södermanland, Sweden.
The date of the above "Liebe Frau vBayern" inquiry, Feb. 1, 2007, suggests the following:
From Log24 on
St. Bridget's Day, 2007:
The quotation
"Science is a Faustian bargain"
and the following figure–
Change
From a short story by
the above Princess:
"'I don't even think she would have wanted to change you. But she for sure did not want to change herself. And her values were simply a part of her.' It was true, too. I would even go so far as to say that they were her basis, if you think about her as a geometrical body. That's what they couldn't understand, because in this age of the full understanding for stretches of values in favor of self-realization of any kind, it was a completely foreign concept."
To make this excellent metaphor mathematically correct,
change "geometrical body" to "space"… as in
"For Princeton's Class of 2007"—
Review of a 2004 production of a 1972 Tom Stoppard play, "Jumpers"–
Related material:
Knight Moves (Log24, Jan. 16),
Kindergarten Theology (St. Bridget's Day, 2008),
and
(Click on image for details.)
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Friday, February 1, 2008
Friday February 1, 2008
Kindergarten Theology
On the late James Edwin Loder,
a Presbyterian minister and
a professor of Christian education
at Princeton Theological Seminary,
co-author of The Knight’s Move (1992):
On the late James Edwin Loder,
a Presbyterian minister and
a professor of Christian education
at Princeton Theological Seminary,
co-author of The Knight’s Move (1992):
“At his memorial service his daughter Tami told the story of ‘little Jimmy,’ whose kindergarten teacher recognized a special quality of mind that set him apart. ‘Every day we read a story, and after the story is over, Jimmy gets up and wants to tell us what the story means.'” — Dana R. Wright
For a related story about
knight moves and kindergarten,
see Knight Moves: The Relativity
Theory of Kindergarten Blocks,
and Log24, Jan. 16, 17, and 18.
See also Loder’s book
(poorly written, but of some
interest in light of the above):
Opening of The Knight’s Move —
“In a game of chess, the knight’s move is unique because it alone goes around corners. In this way, it combines the continuity of a set sequence with the discontinuity of an unpredictable turn in the middle. This meaningful combination of continuity and discontinuity in an otherwise linear set of possibilities has led some to refer to the creative act of discovery in any field of research as a ‘knight’s move’ in intelligence.
The significance of the title of this volume might stop there but for Kierkegaard’s use of the ‘knight’ image. The force of Kierkegaards’s usage might be described in relation to the chess metaphor by saying that not merely does Kierkegaard’s ‘knight of faith’ undertake a unique move within the rules of the human game, but faith transposes the whole idea of a ‘knight’s move’ into the mind of the Chess Master Himself. That is to say, chess is a game of multiple possibilities and interlocking strategies, so a chess master must combine the continuity represented by the whole complex of the game with the unpredictable decision he must make every time it is his turn. A master chess player, then, does not merely follow the rules; in him the game becomes a construct of consciousness. The better the player the more fully the game comes into its own as a creation of human intelligence. Similarly, for Kierkegaard, the knight of faith is a unique figure in human experience. The knight shows how, by existing in faith as a creative act of Christ’s Spirit, human existence comes into its own as an expression of the mind of Christ. Thus, the ultimate form of a ‘knight’s move’ is a creative act raised to the nth power by Spiritus Creator, but it still partakes fully in the concrete pieces and patterns that comprise the nature of the human game and the game of nature.”
— James E. Loder and W. Jim Neidhardt (Helmers & Howard Publishing, 1992)
For a discussion, see Triplett’s
“Thinking Critically as a Christian.”
Many would deny that such
a thing is possible; let them
read the works of T. S. Eliot.
Related material:
The Knight’s Move
discusses (badly) Hofstadter’s
“strange loop” concept; see
Not Mathematics but Theology
(Log24, July 12, 2007).
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Friday, July 7, 2006
Friday July 7, 2006
Born (some say)
on this date:
Yul Brynner
on this date:
Yul Brynner
Mate in 6
(White moves.)
(White: Ke8, Nd7, Be5,
b5, e4, f2. Black: Ke6.)
— Sevitov, 1938
(For solution, click here.)
“… There was a problem laid out on the board, a six-mover. I couldn’t solve it, like a lot of my problems. I reached down and moved a knight….
I looked down at the chessboard. The move with the knight was wrong. I put it back where I had moved it from. Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn’t a game for knights.”— Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep, begun in the summer of 1938
“In this way we are offered a formidable lesson for every Christian community.”
— Pope Benedict XVI on Pentecost, June 4, 2006, St. Peter’s Square.
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